Puppy Locates Your Lost Pet, With A Little Help From Your Friends And Neighbors

There are now countless lost and found devices based on Bluetooth LE technology, and the Puppy from BeLuvv fits that description. It’s a pendant for your dog’s collar, which talks to a companion smartphone app via Bluetooth LE and alerts you when your pet gets too far away (a subjective measure you can change yourself).

That’s not too different from existing devices out there, many of which, while not pet specific, could be easily adapted for their use. But the difference here is that once your pet escapes the range of your own Bluetooth-enabled smartphone, you aren’t stuck with zero options for tracking it further: you can essentially rights-manage your dog, giving permission to trusted friends and neighbors to help you find it when it ventures further afield.

When your dog goes beyond your network, the idea is that it might enter into the Bluetooth range of the devices of your friends, neighbors and family nearby. If they’ve been granted permission, those contacts will get pinged on their phone when it picks up the Bluetooth LE signal put out by the Puppy tracker. This way, your connections call let you know they’ve seen Sparky or Rover, and you can hopefully make your way out to grab them before they run off again.

Puppy doesn’t have GPS or RFID onboard, which could make it harder to find it once it’s lost, but the idea here is to provide a convenient, cheap (it retails for $29.95) and small way to keep track of your pet and alert you before you get into a situation where you have to trek all over the city tracking them down.

BeLuvv has some experience in providing this kind of device and service: it created the Guardian tracker for kids which we covered back in October, which is essentially the same thing but for toddlers instead of poodles. Right now, the Puppy is available for pre-order, but it’s going to ship a first batch of devices on February 21st, the company says.